A while ago someone on Mastodon posted a comment about how people “Don’t know what things are for” when it comes to our so-called leaders. I mean yeah some people know how to make money, but don’t know why things are. They try to get money out of things but don’t care or know.
That kept sitting in my head. People “not knowing what something is for.”
I used to enjoy the show “Dirty Jobs” because it gave me a view into how things worked – what they were for. After watching some poor roadwork in the city I lived in, I took an interest in urban planning and learned more about what things are for. As a Project Manager, I am about getting things done, about what things are for.
And that’s me. I’m sure you have had plenty of experience knowing “what things are for” on the job, in your hobbies, in your life. Some of us grow up in places where it’s part of the fabric of life, from farms to ports to plain historic cities. A lot of us know what things are for.
And, when you know what things are for, you also realize that yes, that person I mentioned was right. A lot of people don’t know what things are for and are making at best bad decisions – at worse just destroying things for greed. Usually seems to be the latter.
Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it. Communities with people and history fearing data centers will drain their power and water, making them not a place just a host. Farms vanishing into giant agribusinesses. The stock market is even more gambling than it ever ones, and real gambling via online apps seems to turn the world into a casino and not a world. Things are stopping being what they are and are just about money or fame or clicks.
It’s a socio-cultural-economic gray goo. It’s turning things into nothing by people who don’t know what things are for.
But when things stop being what they are, then people stop being anything. Who are you in a world where your job is to train a so-called AI to replace you? Where’s a community when it’s just Influencers selling to each other? Who are you in a world where people don’t know what anything is for?
When no one knows what things are for, then people cease being people.
It’s a peculiarly meaningless world some of our so-called leaders have and want. No wonder so many of them seem so empty and angry – their lives are meaningless. No wonder so many of them fall into conspiratorial politics and grandiose racisms, trying to look for some meaning as well as explaining away people hating them. These people who don’t know what anything are for want to be something, something more than nepo babies or knob twiddlers who got lucky.
Those that build a world not knowing what anything is for aren’t anyone.